Turn off WordPress HeartBeat to reduce bandwidth and CPU

Turn off WordPress HeartBeat to reduce bandwidth and CPU

By Strictly-Software

I recently noticed a spike in bandwidth and costs on my Rackspace server. The cost had jumped up a good $30 from normal months.

Now I am still in the process of finding out why this has happened but one thing I did come across was a lot of calls to a script called /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php which was happening every 15 seconds.

Now this is the sign of WordPress's HeartBeat functionality which allows the server and browser to communicate and I quote from the inmotionhosting.com website, HeartBeat

allows WordPress to communicate between the web-browser and the server. It allows for improved user session management, revision tracking, and auto saving.

The WordPress Heartbeat API uses /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php to run AJAX calls from the web-browser. Which in theory sounds awesome, as WordPress can keep track of what's going on in the dashboard.

However this can also start sending excessive requests to admin-ajax.php which can lead to high CPU usage. Anytime a web-browser is left open on a page using the Heartbeat API, this could potentially be an issue.

Therefore I scanned my log files and found that my own server IP was making calls to a page every 15 seconds e.g

62.21.14.247 - - [11/Nov/2014:15:00:20 +0000] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1" 200 98 "http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=28968&action=edit&message=1" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36" 0/799585
62.21.14.247 - - [11/Nov/2014:15:00:35 +0000] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1" 200 98 "http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=28968&action=edit&message=1" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36" 25/25540888

I checked my browser (Chrome) which I do leave lots of windows open for ages, multi tasking :) , and I found that I had left open a post edit window in WordPress. This was causing the HeartBeat to call the script every 15 seconds.

Now I don't know that this is the ONLY reason for my increase in Bandwidth and obviously CPU due to all the HTTP requests but I am guessing it made up a big part of it.

Therefore I decided to turn off the HeartBeat functionality.

I have already disabled auto saving and revisions as I don't need that functionality so I am going to see what happens - hopefully my costs will go down!

Turning Off WordPress HeartBeat

To turn off the HeartBeat functionality go to your themes functions.php file and put the following code at the top of it.

// stop heartbeat code
add_action( 'init', 'stop_heartbeat', 1 );

function stop_heartbeat() {
        wp_deregister_script('heartbeat');

}

So I will see what happens with this turned off. So far not a lot.

However if you do notice a spike in your Bandwidth or CPU and you use WordPress check you haven't left a page open in your browser that would be causing the HeartBeat function to call the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php every 15 seconds!